For the curious reader, popular medical science claims that masturbation is healthy for young men (because girls don’t masturbate, apparently), but one question always rears its head: How much masturbation is too much? Fuck.com writer ILB shares his experience and opinion.

As a young man who came to masturbation quite late (I was 18 when I started), it was a question I asked myself more than a few times... never coming to a definite conclusion. I could have thought more about it, but I usually got distracted and would, instead, go off for a stress-relieving wank.

The fact that it took me years before I admitted to masturbating also delayed the occasion that I got around to asking anyone else about it. JackinWorld, a US website all about masturbation, gave a slightly nebulous attempt at an answer. Something like “there is no such thing as too much masturbation unless it interferes with your daily life and usual activities”, which meant very little to me as a student but it made a friend laugh when I read it to him.

“Usual activities?” he wheezed, turning around in his computer chair.
“I don’t know,” I shrugged, reclining on his bed. “I mean, how many times do you do it?”
“Twice a day, maybe? Except when people are staying with me, then I don’t do it at all.”
“Not at all?”
“Not always.”

As our conversation continued from there on and continued onto MSN once I’d gotten home that night, we shared more. We both enjoyed masturbation; we both set time aside for it as well as doing it spontaneously; we both watched porn when we needed an aid (he was gay, so he didn’t like any of my recommendations). We both masturbated even when talking to other people on MSN... which, of course, made me wonder. But not too much.

Something I didn’t tell him was that, for years, I was convinced I was masturbating too much. I was, initially, a victim of my efforts to stop completely – and, when that didn’t work, to cut down. “I’ll jerk,” I’d tell myself, “but I won’t jerk off. I don’t need any orgasms.” My blossoming sex life was more of a continuing cycle of masturbating, having orgasms, feeling guilty, deleting all my porn, ...and starting again.

I also didn’t tell him that I didn’t start masturbating until after I’d had sex for the first time – well after – or that I used to deal with my erections by curling into the foetal position and waiting for them to subside. And, of course, I didn’t tell him anything about my constant attempts to quit.

It wasn’t until university that I gave up trying to give up. I had a lot of free time and had, in a short space of time, been dumped by my girlfriend, forgotten by all those at school and realised that I wasn’t going to make any new friends where I was. I bought some telephony equipment, hacked into the internet from my room, and discovered a whole new world of porn, erotica, and sexual excitement.

And I haven’t looked back.

So if you were to ask me the question – is there such a thing as too much masturbation (and, if so, how much is too much?) – I doubt I’d ever reach a definitive answer. I can reminisce at length about my experiences, attempts, discoveries and masturbation. I can tell you how much I masturbate now, or even how much I used to. I can even think back to frank conversations about exactly how much wanking went on in our early 20s.

I can’t give you an answer because there isn’t one. There’s one for me; there’s one for you. Like most things in life, the answer’s probably different for everyone.